The new Magento StackExchange went public this week, and so far the beta is coming along well. We're a little short on some benchmarks, but with only a few days of public beta those numbers are sure to climb up. The only thing that
astormMagento Layout XML Quirks on CMS Pages This Magento StackExchange question is a good example of how Magento’s flexible system behavior can be seen as inconsistant by people outside the project. My answer also contains a few good examples of how Commerce Bug can help track these sorts of things down. The Magento StackExchange [...]
astormDebugging Category 404 Pages How to debug why your category page is returning a 404 error. (Need an invite to the Magento StachExchange private beta? Get in touch.)
astormProgrammatically Undo a Magento Rewrite An answer on the new Magento Stack Exchange site that shows you how to modify the Magento configuration at runtime to conditionally undo a class rewrite. Possibly the worst idea ever. If you need an invite to the Magento StackExchange tell me why you’d be a good addition and I’ll get an [...]
astormHow “before” and “after” Work in Magento Layout XML The Stack Overflow question/answer is a perfect example of the I don’t think that feature does what you think it does problem. These sorts of problems get magnified when a project’s culture doesn’t support transparent, open, respectful [...]
astormLets speed things up a bit: Hide the payment methods on specific shipping method in Magento speedupmate: I’m getting lot of questions on how to hide a payment method when specific shipping method is chosen in checkout. While asking this users also point to magento forums where examples are given with extreme template hacking and payment [...]
astormDates and time are always messy to work with in programming environments, and coming up with the right set of filters to accurately represent a date range in Magento is no exception. This is “extra” true given the trickiness of creating nested OR queries with Magento’s ORM. Fortunately, someone on the Magento core team [...]
astormWhile most of my consulting opportunities come via word of mouth, I still keep half an eye on the various tech job boards. Partly to see what sort of compensation people are offering (everything from $7/hour to $125,000/year), and partially because I grew up in Buffalo during the 80s and have an ingrained fear of any job market bottoming [...]
astormFor developers and themers who spend their day in Magento's layout XML files, finding the name of a particular block can be the difference between taking an early lunch or telling their spouse they won't be home for diner. Fortunately, Commerce Bug takes this
astormMoving a Block in Magento Ben Marks takes a break from promoting the new Magento Stack Exchange site to explain to move a block in Magento.
astormHappy New Year! With Magento firmly ensconced in the warm embrace of eBay, and the rest of the retail world gearing up for a fight to redefine its relationship with Amazon, 2013 is going to be an interesting year for Magento. For those of
astormDoes an Order Exist? A Stack Overflow question showing several techniques to determine if an order exists in your system or not.
astormI was listening to the Stack Exchange podcast about Hurricane Sandy, and one of the guest mentioned offhandedly that Square Space hosts around a million and a half websites. That’s backed up by this Business Insider content blurb. For those not familiar with the platform, Square Space offers a custom online CMS for creating and [...]
astormAdding a Block “The Right” Way Wherein a attempt to answer the unanswerable “what’s the right way to add a block to a page in Magento” question.
astormIf Magento Connect’s installation procedure is a little too mysterious for you, check out the contents of downloader/.cache This hidden folder will contain a copy of the downloaded tgz package files downloaded by the connect manager.
astormA Rewrite too Far An interesting Magento question that shows some of the problems with a super flexible OO system. In summation, a client developer tried to add a simple rewrite which added a type_id product collection filter. However, in a second part of the system, a core team client developer used the filters on the product collection [...]
astormMagento Option Labels not Saving Magento’s UI layer uses metaphors more commonly found in Java GUI programming. You just call something like addInput from PHP, and don’t worry about the HTML that’s produced. One side effect that always to crops up when these patterns are used is out of control HTML forms. This Stack [...]
astormObserver Strategy for a Winning Redirect Magento redirects confused the h— out of me for a few years. Most PHP developers are used to a header('Location: ' . $url); exit; pattern. When you use the Magento response object to perform a redirect, execution continues, and the redirect doesn’t happen until after the controller has [...]
astormWhere do those numbers in Magento URLs come from? Short version: They’re if-not-actually-then-effectively, non-deterministic for day to day development.
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